Offerings

In homes, public places and sacred spaces during Lunar New Year, one sees elaborate arrangements of fruit and other items such as candles, incense, bamboo and flowers placed as offerings and signs of respect to ancestors and deities (mostly Buddhist and Taoist). Their artful arrangement signifies abundance, esteem and generosity.

Often the choice of certain objects is due to their verbal  association with these ideas. Chinese and Vietnamese wordplay makes frequent use of homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings) as stand-ins for these concepts. So, for example, in Mandarin, tangerines are used throughout because the word for them is close in sound to the one for auspiciousness, lettuce is similar to one that means to make money, fish stands in for abundance. In Vietnamese a line-up of fruits: soursop, coconut, papaya and mango are almost a sound-alike for the sentence "Asking for sufficient abundance, resources and wealth."